Interkulturelle Literatur in Deutschland: Ein Handbuch by Carmine Chiellino (review)

Abstract

256 Reviews and suggests how farboth genre and interpretation have developed beyond the canonical field. University of Salford Juliet Wigmore Interkulturelle Literatur in Deutschland: Ein Handbuch. Ed. by Carmine Chiellino. Stuttgart and Weimar: Metzler. 2000. X+ 535PP. ?30. ISBN 3-476-01618-8 (hbk). This exceedingly useful volume has five sections. The firstconsists of a historical, a political, and an economic and social survey of the various groups who settled in the Federal Republic in the period 1955-2000. The firstgreat population movements towards the end of the war and in the immediate post-war years are therefore not part of the project, nor is German-Jewish writing included in the literature section. This section traces an unhappy history as successive governments tried to deal with immigration while simultaneously refusing to accept that the Federal Republic was a country of immigration. The essays cover so much ground that they sometimes require prior knowledge, e.g. on the various violent attacks on foreigners, which are simply listed by geographical location. But they condense a mass of information and statistics, which will offera useful starting point for students, and have substantial bibliographies for further reading. The next section is devoted to literature by authors from the following minorities: ltalian, Spanish, Greek, Yugoslavand people fromthe subsequent states ofthe region, Portuguese, Turkish, Russian-German, Russian, Romanian-German, and other East European groups; there are also essays on authors from Brazil, from Spanish-speaking South America, from the Arab cultural sphere, from Black Africa, and from Asia. Each chapter has initial material, e.g. historical sketches of successive generations or of differentcategories, such as Polish or Czech and Slovak authors. Thereafter come sketches of selected individual authors. This section will inevitably be less useful to experts, but offersvaluable orientation for the newcomer. The third section offerssurveys oftheatre, of cabaret and satire by German-Turkish authors, of music (a fascinating range is covered), of cinema, and of the visual arts, including painting, graphic art, sculpture, and installations. These chapters are less congested than the literary ones. Mark Terkessidis, forexample, has space to develop recent theory on humour and ethnicity in the cabaret chapter while Deniz Goktiirk escapes the survey mode to offerstimulatingly provocative evaluations of TurkishGerman films,preferringthose which offertransnational role play over a subnational cinema depicting objectified victims as objects of pity. A fourth section offers three essays of theoretical reflection. 'Kulturen im ProzeB der Migration und die Kultur der Migrationen', by Konrad Kostlin, argues that all modern cultures are porous and in flux, hence are in fact multicultural. 'Interkulturalitat und Literaturwissenschaft', by the volume editor Chiellino, explores the rather halting rise of German academic study of intercultural literature and also surveys the scene in Italy, the USA, and Britain (including symposiums in Shef? field and Swansea). 'Deutsch als Fremdsprache und Deutsch als Zweitsprache', by Stefanie Ohnesorg and Bernhard Martin, looks at educational policy on language teaching. Chiellino, who sets out the aims of the project in a preface and again in an introduction to the literature section, argues that there are family resemblances which justify the notion of intercultural literature despite the very disparate societies and histories fromwhich the various groups and authors spring. The defining intercultural characteristics occasionally conflict with the equally necessary attention to cultural specifics and can sound over-normative in privileging postmodern sophistication MLRy 98.1, 2003 257 over realist literature. In the main, however, the case for intercultural literature as a coherent ifhighly complex field of study is convincingly argued. The volume also has a sequence of highly informative appendices: the media and migrants; research centres, other institutions, and prizes; bibliographies for groups and individuals along with short C Vs; an index ofnames; notes on the editor and contributors and on illustrations. University of Nottingham Elizabeth Boa A Hundred Years ofAndrei Platonov. Vol. i. Ed. by Angela Livingstone. (Essays in Poetics, 26 (Autumn, 2001), Platonov Special Issue in Two Volumes) Keele: Keele Students Union Press. 2001. v+167 pp. ?20. ISBN 0-9509080-5-3. 1999 was not only the year of Pushkin and Nabokov, but also of Platonov. This and his undoubted, but oft-disputed, significance in Soviet literature have led to a considerable number of publications over...